Blog also known as SathyaSaiMemories ~ stories of love in action and the benefits of giving

evil

Interesting piece from “The Tibetan” Methinks this needs to be posted on my blog today. Sorry folks not to have been posting my usual stuff this year, I have two cataracts, one on each eye, both need to be removed. Must say cataracts are horrible, they restrict my writing and reading. I will be happy when they are gone and my eyesight is restored. I cannot wait until I can see well again and I will be able to write again with confidence. The photos used for this post are from a Face Book page, sadly I forget the titles of the images. Sorry.

A little about the Dweller on the Threshold for your interest. – “The Dweller on the Threshold is illusion-glamour-maya, as realized by the physical brain and recognized as that which must be overcome. It is the bewildering thought form with which the disciple is confronted, when he seeks to pierce through the accumulated glamours of the ages, and find his true home in the place of light.” I guess that does not explain too well the inner significance of the Indweller – here’s the link http://www.esoteric-philosophy.net/dweller.html –

THE DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD

“The Dweller on the Threshold is illusion-glamour-maya, as realized by the physical brain and recognized as that which must be overcome. It is the bewildering thoughtform with which the disciple is confronted, when he seeks to pierce through the accumulated glamours of the ages, and find his true home in the place of light.”

“The Dweller on the Threshold does not emerge out of the fog of illusion and glamour, until the disciple is nearing the Gates of Life. Only when he can catch dim glimpses of the Portal of Initiation and an occasional flash of Light from the Angel of the Presence, Who stands waiting beside that door, can he come to grips with the principle of duality, which is embodied for him in the Dweller and the Angel. . . . As yet, my words embody for you symbolically a future condition and event. The day will surely come, however, when you will stand in full awareness between these symbols of the pairs of opposites, with the Angel on the right and the Dweller on the left. May strength then be given to you to drive straight forward between these two opponents, who have for long ages waged warfare in the field of your life, and so may you enter into the Presence where the two are seen as one, and naught is known but life and deity.”

“The Dweller on the Threshold is oft regarded as a disaster, as a horror to be avoided, and as a final and culminating evil. I would here remind you, nevertheless, that the Dweller is ‘one who stands before the gate of God’, who dwells in the shadow of the portal of initiation, and who faces the Angel of the Presence open-eyed, as the ancient Scriptures call it. The Dweller can be defined as the sum total of the forces of the lower nature, as expressed in the personality, prior to illumination, to inspiration, and to initiation. The personality per se, is, at this stage, exceedingly potent, and the Dweller embodies all the psychic and mental forces which, down the ages, have been unfolded in man, and nurtured with care. It can be looked upon as the potency of the threefold material form, prior to its conscious co-operation and dedication to the life of the soul, and to the service of the Hierarchy, of God, and of Humanity.

The Dweller on the Threshold is all that man is, apart from the higher spiritual self; it is the third aspect of divinity, as expressed in and through the human mechanism. This third aspect must be eventually subordinated to the second aspect, the soul.”

“Memory . . . is not simply just a faculty of the mind, as is so often supposed, but it is essentially a creative power. It is basically an aspect of thought, and – -coupled with imagination — is a creative agent, because thoughts are things, as well you know. From ancient recesses of the memory, from a deeply rooted past, which is definitely recalled, and from the racial and individual subconscious (or founded and established thought reservoirs and desires, inherited and inherent) there emerges from the individual past lives and experience, that which is the sum total of all instinctual tendencies, of all inherited glamours, and of all phases of wrong mental attitudes; to these, (as they constitute a blended whole) we give the name of the Dweller on the Threshold. This Dweller is the sum total of all the personality characteristics which have remained unconquered and unsubdued, and which must be finally overcome before initiation can be taken. Each life sees some progress made; some personality defects straightened out, and some real advance effected. But the unconquered residue, and the ancient liabilities are numerous, and excessively potent, and — when the soul contact is adequately established — there eventuates a life wherein the highly developed and powerful personality becomes, in itself, the Dweller on the Threshold. Then the Angel of the Presence and the Dweller stand face to face, and something must then be done. Eventually, the light of the personal self fades out and wanes in the blaze of glory which emanates from the Angel. Then the greater glory obliterates the lesser. This is, however, only possible when the personality eagerly enters into this relation with the Angel, recognizes itself as the Dweller, and — as a disciple — begins the battle between the pairs of opposites, and enters into the tests of Scorpio. These tests and trials are ever self-initiated; the disciple puts himself into the positive or conditioning environment wherein the trials and the discipline are unavoidable and inevitable. When the mind has reached a relatively high stage of development, the memory aspect is evoked in a new and conscious manner, and then every latent predisposition, every racial and national instinct, every unconquered situation, and every controlling fault, rises to the surface of consciousness, and then — the fight is on.”

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“The Dweller on the Threshold, always present, swings however into activity only on the Path of Discipleship, when the aspirant becomes occultly aware of himself, of the conditions induced within him as a result of his interior illusion, his astral glamour, and the maya surrounding his entire life. Being now an integrated personality (and no one is disciple, my brother, unless he is mental as well as emotional, which is the point the devotee oft forgets) these three conditions . . . are seen as a whole, and to this whole the term ‘Dweller on the Threshold’ is applied. It is in reality a vitalized thoughtform — embodying mental force, astral force and vital energy.”

Just a little request for people all over the world and children of light to please start reflecting on the stories of your souls to vibrate wisdom around the earth. You can do that with any little gift you have. Like photography or writing or painting! You need not be a big star or a public figure. Just be yourself! You can pick up a coloured pencil or a microphone and begin! Press the inks of your pens onto pretty paper or tap words into your computer or iphone and start sharing what you know and have learned with all those people out there.You can do anything you want if you are focused on it. Turn your personal story into a piece of the earth’s puzzle so that our combined thoughts, feelings, our lessons learned and our deeply-felt convictions, reveal common truths that cannot be denied. Just imagine the changes that could happen if people everywhere, suddenly stopped acting like someone else and became true to themselves and celebrated the beauty of their uniqueness.It’s only after people have willingly removed their false masks and false costumes and false ideals and have begun pouring light from their hearts to reveal their vulnerability, dreams and pain, will we be able to see that beneath the surface, we are all the same, although each one unique. After all, how can the world collectively fight for truth, if soldiers in its armies are devoid of truth? We must first of all be true by putting the ultimate truth into our words, into our actions and into life itself. And to do so, everyone must learn to think and react with their conscience. Imagine what Truth could do to neutralise the forces of evil once this black and white world suddenly becames energized by a sense of amazing, unified voices. We could put back vivid colour into every home, every school, every industry, every nation, and every garden on earth where flowers have been crushed by corruption.

During the past 4 weeks we have watched Greece battle with the IMF, The German and French Banks, the politicians and finance ministers for a better deal. They have not succeeded. Even with their brave determination at a solid “No” vote in last Sunday’s referendum, they still look like they will be worse off than before. And no matter what we might think of Greece, as being irresponsible, the ordinary people who probably were never in a position to be other than what they are today, continue to suffer horrendously, under austerity measures that are ruining expectations in Europe for any reasonable recovery. Banks, it seems, can be bailed out. People can’t. Greed has given way to a new lower goal that beggars belief. It’s called Evil Selfishness.

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Sri Yogananda, wrote often about human greed. He called it Evil Selfishness. This is how he describes it.

“Evil selfishness is that which actuates a man to seek his own comfort by destroying the comforts of others. To be rich at the cost of another’s loss is ignorance, and is against the interests of the higher individual Self of the persons who engages in such selfishness. To delight in hurting others’ feelings by carping criticism is also evil selfishness. Evil Selfishness carries a huge karmic debt, that has to be paid back. (Bankers included.) 🙂

True and good selfishness motivates a man to seek his own comfort, prosperity, and happiness by also making others more prosperous and happy. Evil selfishness hides its many destructive teeth of inevitable suffering beneath the apparently innocent looks of temporary comfort-assurances. Evil selfishness encloses one in a small circle and shuts out the rest of humanity. Good selfishness takes everybody along with one’s own self into the circle of brotherhood. Good selfishness brings many harvests – return services from others, self-expansion, divine sympathy, lasting happiness, and Self-realization.

To avoid the pitfalls of evil selfishness, one should first follow and establish himself in the pattern of good selfishness, wherein one thinks of his family and those whom he serves as part of himself. From that attainment, one can then advance to a practice of Sacred selfishness, or unselfishness in which one sees all the universe as himself.”

Now is this black and white to you? 🙂

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A brief post from the Masterful Don Miguel Ruiz, called the “Dream Of The Planet” – a follow-on from my last post “Every Human Is An Artist,” (Prayers – A Communion With Our Creator) blogged from a month ago, and posted on June 22, 2014 . I hope some of you will remember it...

I thought I’d offer another excerpt from “Prayers – A Communion With Our Creator“, as this little book is just crammed full of gems of wisdom and other truths. All prayer is a communion of the human with the divine. Whether prayers are offered in love or gratitude and inspiration, or from fear, despair, or desperation, we talk heart-to-heart with divine spirit. When we don’t pray, and I must say, I don’t pray as often as I used to, we feel more alone, cut off from our own hearts, and our own power. When I don’t pray, I write posts like this, because positive writing is a prayer, it is an agreement between the heart and the divine, an investment in faith, and helps foster the intent.

~ Thank you, eve

…“Together with my new post is kwisital,s eye-catching you tube, “AWAKENING INTO INFINITE LOVE AND LIGHT.” Kwisital is a French guy with a deft hand with both music and film, he creates pretty amazing you tubes often using English quotations. I love his imagery and his creativity, use of color and sound. I hope you will take two or three minutes to watch his you tube.

The dream of the planet is the dream of all humans together. We can call it society, we can call it a nation, but the result of the creation of the mind, individual and collective, is a dream. The dream can be a pleasant dream that we call heaven or it can be a nightmare, that we call hell. But heaven and hell only exist at the level of the mind.

The human society, the dream of the planet is ruled by lies, and fear is the result. It is a dream where humans judge one another, find one another guilty, and punish one another. Humans use the power of the word to gossip and to hurt one another. Misuse of the word creates emotional poison, and all the emotional poison is in the dream. It goes around the world, and that is what most humans eat: “emotional poison.” The dream of the planet prepares newborn humans to believe what it wants them to believe. In that dream, there is no justice; there is only injustice. Nothing is perfect; there is only imperfection. That is why humans eternally search for justice, for happiness, and for love.

For thousands of years people have believe there is a conflict between good and evil in the universe. But this is not true. The real conflicts is between truth and what is not truth. The conflict exists in the human mind, not in the rest of nature. Good and evil are the result of that conflict. Believing in truth results in goodness; believing in and defending what is not truth results in evil. Evil is just the result of believing in lies.

Why is there so much evil in the world? To bemoan the evil so prevalent today is to fail to take account of our part. The walls we build around ourselves create an illusion of separateness. Our egos dwell there and crave power, authority, and dominion – stings of the serpent’s venom. The fundamental duality of good and evil is then taken as a law unto itself. Although it will not be stayed in its course, on a large, cosmic scale, evil derives from a blockage of a circulation of vital energy. Here, in this post, I’ve decided to address evil through quotes that I have come to admire on this topic. I hope they will be useful and interesting to the reader. Eve

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From the viewpoint of the initiate seeking wisdom, evil is dissipation, a scattering of one’s energies and attention, whereas good is that which leads to spiritual concentration, that is to unity.

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A permanent idea of good and evil can be formed in man only in connection with a permanent aim and a permanent understanding. If a man understands that he is asleep and if he wishes to awake, then everything that helps him to awake will be good and everything that hinders him, everything that prolongs his sleep, will be evil. But this is so only for those who want to awake, that is, for those who understand that they are asleep. Those who do not understand that they are asleep and those who can have no wish to awake, cannot have understanding of good and evil. And as the overwhelming majority of people do not realize and will never realize that they are asleep, neither good nor evil can actually exist for them.

-G. I. Gurdjieff.

Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too much to give it up.

– Mohandas K. Gandhi

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The idea of sacred medicine teaches us that the universe is conscious only to conscious man, and that there are states of being in which universally active forces can reach my body from within my body. These forces cannot act upon my body from without, except as my body is part of organic life on earth with its great cycles of life, death, fertilization, and decay. The ego cannot battle against that either in nature or in the body. body. …

Man in the state of egoism is crushed by the universe, both actually and in theory. The ego alone, with all its bodily habits to support it, lives in a hostile universe because it constantly fights to preserve itself. It is a euphemism to speak of the universe of modern science as unalive, non-living. We call it a dead universe because we are unable to bear that our state of consciousness evokes a hostile universe. Traditional man was clearer about the enmity we gather when we live severed from a higher consciousness. It is a lawful enmity to be sure, not directed to me personally, but it is a genuine enmity and to communicate this, it is not so far from the mark to speak of evil spirits and of punishment.

– Jacob Needleman

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Wherever we are, we can train as a warrior. the Practices of meditation, loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are our tools. With help of these practices, we can uncover the “soft-spot” Bodhichitta. We will find that tenderness in sorrow and in gratitude. We will find it behind the hardness of rage and in the shakiness of fear. It is available in loneliness as well as in kindness.

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A Warrior-in-training

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A few years ago, I met a man who thought all women were evil. What a sweeping statement, I thought. There are people of both genders who do evil deeds. Evil has no preference to gender or race, not to my way of thinking. I tried to befriend this person whose aloofness should have been a warning that I was stepping on stony ground. Yet, I was compelled in some odd way to try, although we had little in common. Still, I hoped to offer some sort of support, perhaps just a smile, or a cheery hello when we met. Perhaps a cup of coffee to break the ice now and then. I had no idea at the time, that I had entered forbidden territory altogether. Any attempt to be friendly would be met with difficulty and finally failure for, I would soon find out that trying to be of help to him , I was in fact, a repellent of sorts, a “persona non grata .” A better Warrior than me would not have tried. They would have let well alone. I guess in Warrior training it is not all about how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to the discomfort of the outcome. Yes indeed!

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Another Warrior-in-training

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For Pancho, the whole World, every moment, is his field of Metta practice.When he was recently asked what nourishes him, his response was clear: meditation and small acts of kindness. Meditation deepens his awareness while small acts of kindness deepens his inter-connectedness. Or as Pancho would sum it up, “Meditation is the DNA of the kindness revolution.” Ever since he first went to a meditation retreat, he has continued to meditate everyday.”Pancho 2.0″ is what he calls himself since then. It was as if he discovered a new technology to battle our burning world.

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Spirituality often sees activism as unnecessarily binding, while activism often sees spirituality as a navel-gazing escape. For Pancho, though, the two paths merge into one. Meditation is internal service, while service is external meditation.

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In Arizona, when Pancho was arrested for protesting immigration laws that President Obama called unconstitutional, he smiles peacefully for his mug shot. The Sheriff yells out an order: “Stop smiling.”Immediately, it mirrors the ridiculousness of the request. Several years ago, some of Pancho’s friends lived in a tree to ignite a conversation around “chopping down 300 year old trees in 30 minutes.” When the authorities put a barricade around the tree to starve the tree-sitters, Pancho showed up to meditate and spread “Metta” (loving kindness) to all those around him. While sitting peacefully under the tree, he was arrested. His offense quite literally read: “Disturbing the peace.”

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I suppose one could say being a warrior-in-training is a form of disturbing the peace, ha!

source: small excerpt about Pancho was originally written for Parabola Magazine, by Nipun Mehta .

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“One of the most often posed questions I receive from readers is: “Why is there so much evil in the world? Why is there so much violence and hate?”The answer is simple. Because we’ve forgotten who we are and why we are here on this planet. That answer may sound like the preface to some airy-fairy metaphysical book, but it’s not. Understanding who we are is essential to living a balanced life. I am talking, of course, about the human soul.”

-Cassandra Blizzard

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This Soul, says Love, is imprisoned and held in the country of
complete peace, for is always in full sufficiency, in which she swims
and bobs and floats, and she is surrounded by divine peace, without
any movement in her interior, and without any exterior work on her
part. These two things would remove this peace from her if they could
penetrate to her, but they cannot, for she is in the sovereign state
where they cannot pierce or disturb her about anything. If she does
any exterior thing, it is always without herself. If God does His work
in her, it is by Him in her, for her sake. Such a Soul is no more
encumbered by this than is her angel by guarding her. No more is an
angel encumbered by guarding us than if he never guarded us at all. So
also neither is such a Soul encumbered by what she does without
herself than if she had never done it at all. For she has nothing of
herself. She has given all freely without a why, for she is the lady
of the Bridegroom of her youth. He is the Sun who shines and warms and
nourishes the life of being separate from His Being. This Soul has
retained neither doubt nor anxiety any longer.

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REASON: Why therefore? says Reason.

LOVE: A sure alliance and a true concordance by willing only the
divine ordinance.”

– from THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS by Marguerite Porete (ISBN 0809134276)

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Photo Source: National Geographic

The good and Evil Actions Of Man Affect the Harmonious Balance Of The Earth.

Excerpted from The Divine Romance – Sri. Yogananda

“God has given man the power of destruction as well as the power of creation. We have made the world beautiful, and we have the power to destroy it. When we desecrate the world, the environment undergoes a violent change, which is called partial dissolution. Such upheavals have occurred many times, one example is Noah’s flood. These partial dissolutions are due to the wrong actions and ignorant errors of mankind. Don’t think “the happenings” of this world are going on automatically without God’s knowledge. And don’t think that man’s actions have no effect on the operation of His cosmic laws. Everything that has happened throughout the ages is recorded in the ether. The vibrations of evil that mankind leaves in the ether upset the normal harmonious balance of the earth. When the earth becomes very heavy with disease and evil, these etheric disturbances cause the world to give way to earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters.”

It is the same as when you live wrongly for a long time; various in harmonies begin to manifest in your body, as well as certain diseases. Disease is not a punishment. It is a poison that you yourself create in the body, and the Divine wants you to get rid of it. But all too often, by the time you try to throw it off, the body has become completely deranged, and you die. So, just like the human body, the earth suffers from inharmonious disturbances and disease. And it is because the combined actions of the people all over the world affect the planet on which we live. There is no question about it. The good and bad karmic conditions created by man determine and influence the climate; they affect the wind and the ocean, even the very structure of the earth, sometimes causing earthquakes. All the hatred, the anger, the evil we send out into the world, and the agony and rebellion they cause, all these are disturbing the magnetic force of the earth, like static in the ether.

In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being; he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison. I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a “child of darkness” who is equal and complementary to the more obvious “child of light.” ~Laurens van der Post

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! – Kate Chopin

Eve

Hello, to All People Everywhere, This blog is an on-going adventure in all things with a spiritual dint - and there are my photographs too. I must confess to photographing flowers macro style because they are such a delightful subject and not at all camera shy. Both have given me a great deal of pleasure and some pain over the years.
Eve